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Calls for independent oversight of border police renewed

Pressure mounts on the federal government for CBSA to have official oversight. Advocacy groups point to alleged abuses by enforcement officials.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, says "there needs to be independent review for all of CBSA's national security, enforcement and border policing activities."

Seven years after a judicial inquiry recommendation to subject the agency to independent review, the call has fallen on deaf ears by the federal government, said Josh Paterson of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

“There is no excuse for seven years of doing nothing to ensure Canada’s border police are accountable to independent oversight,” Paterson said in Vancouver on Wednesday.

“That is seven years of people having virtually nowhere to turn when they have a complaint about the CBSA. . . There needs to be independent review for all of CBSA’s national security, enforcement and border policing activities.”

Mandated under Canada’s customs and immigration laws, CBSA officers, like their counterparts in police services, have the powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure.

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Unlike police officers, who are subject to independent civilian oversights, complaints against CBSA are investigated and adjudicated by the agency itself.

University of British Columbia law professor Catherine Dauvergne, of the refugee council, said her organization wrote to CBSA President Luc Portelance last October following the death of a Tamil refugee who arrived on the MV Sun Sea cargo ship and was later deported to Sri Lanka.

“We still have not heard back from the CBSA president. Nothing,” Dauvergne told the Star. “The CCR has been making this call (for oversight) for over a decade. This is long overdue.”

According to the groups, CBSA officials can stop travellers for questioning, take breath and blood samples, and search, detain and arrest non-citizens without a warrant.

“CBSA officers have sweeping powers of investigation, with few constraints and no oversight. (Refugee) claimants and migrants fear being imprisoned or deported if they report incidents of bullying, threats or abusive interrogations,” said Mitchell Goldberg, vice-president of the national refugee lawyer association.

“There must be independent oversight of CBSA to ensure integrity and transparency in day-to-day operations.”

In 2006, Justice Dennis O’Connor recommended CBSA’s national security activities be subject to oversight of a restructured and newly empowered Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. However, Ottawa has yet to extend its mandate to include CBSA.

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